There’s a friend of mine, a very successful artist, who I admire very much. I met him twenty years ago when we were working together in a dirty nightclub in South Melbourne; he was collecting glasses and I was bouncing. We both aspired to art, and he hit critical pay-dirt much earlier than I (who am I fooling – I still haven’t got there).
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Caveat:
This has been written to disturb you.
Invitation:
Summon your personal incarnation of this figure into your mind’s eye and look through it like a lens while you’re reading this.
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The tyres shrieking their demand for traction
Where the road crests the brow of the mountain
Afternoon is a golden smelter in
The crucible of the speedometer
The ceramic squeal of heated rotors
As brakes negotiate with the motor
Stark black warnings screaming from yellow signs
Driven by rhythm of white centre line
A hare, erect and startled, stands roadside
Headlights fulminate in its amber eyes
One figure riveted as sentinel
To the flipside of the other’s vigil
Iron grey dusk rears up, pure reverie
As the turbo howls like a Valkyrie
…Because every bloke should write a poem about his car.
2.
I wonder if I’ve become a kind of Max Cady figure for her. Perhaps I am representative of old misdeeds and have turned up, winking and flashing like a bad penny.
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“I am not telling the truth about Dean, I am creating him out of my own inadequacies. You must always remember that.”
– James Salter,
A Sport and a Pastime.
It is worth mentioning that I found myself awake this morning, on my day off, at 4:11am. For this, I blame Y-.
For whatever reason, good or bad, I decided last night to stalk her on Instagram.
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I promise not to flinch to hate
I will embrace this gift of pain
I will not hide your sovereign light
Beneath this abject cloak of shame
I promise not to run and hide
Concealed in darkness of another
Nor pull your faults across my eyes
I’ll keep my word to stand and suffer
Night folds me in blackened wings
And paints a landscape sinister
Your beating heart, it echoes still
Through the tangle of my viscera
That rhythm scores these absent days
On the sunless side of always
And for those who prefer their sonnets in the traditional pentameter…
I promise that I’ll not flinch into hate
I will fully embrace this gift of pain
I will not turn and hide your sovereign light
Underneath this abject cloak of shame
I promise I’ll not run away and hide
Or curl up in darkness of another
I will not pull your faults across my eyes
I’ll keep my word that I’ll stand and suffer
As night enfolds me in its blackened wings
And paints a landscape chill and sinister
The beating of your heart, it echoes still
Through darkling tangle of my viscera
Its rhythm scores these silent, stagnant days
Encamped on the sunless side of always
2.
The notion of a relationship becoming deeper and more profound as people begin to ‘transgress’ the boundaries of what a twenty-first century reader would describe as vanilla sex is also a time-worn strategy.
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1.
A Sport and a Pastime is considered – by Americans – to be an American classic. My first question, upon finishing the book, is, ‘What makes something a classic? What makes it ‘feel’ like one?’
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Your stride faltered in hesitation as
The young man held the door to let you pass
His face eclipsed by yours – a brief reflection
His eyes stalled by yours within the glass
I’d hoped to catch this moment in the mirror
Rising from the lines upon my face
But read the time less from standing figures
Than from the way you spanned the empty space
This morning’s spectre of your fragrant heat
Attendant to your body’s pooling shadow
Trickles through the reef of cotton sheet as
A frigid breeze rattles the open window
I kiss your neck, then disappear from sight
You turn to face the weeping winter light
What’s it about?
What amounts to a terrorist cell in mid-nineteenth century Russia and its effect on a small fictional town of Dostoyevsky’s invention.
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